Last week, Procurement Central attempted to incite a new war over On Demand and Software as a Service (SaaS). ERP executive-turned-blogger-turned-open source evangelist Dave Stephens used the release of Aberdeen Group’s latest On Demand Supply Management Benchmark report to try to minimize the significance of On Demand and SaaS as merely a new flavor of application hosting. 

Personally, I find this argument particularly amusing in light of Dave’s recent championing of open source and services oriented architectures (SOA). While I would never claim to be a software engineer, it seems to me that open source and SOA can very easily be characterized as the latest refrain of component-based architectures and object-oriented architectures before that. (Second verse, same as the first…)

Dave might admit that open source and SOA borrow some attributes of these earlier development approaches, but he would strongly argue that the business orientation of open source is inherently different, fostering collaborative development, reinforcing the use (and reuse) of industry standards and application code, and exponentially multiplying available software engineering resources. 

Similarly, I would argue that On Demand is very different than preceeding application service provdier (ASP) models. (Dave and I have respectively described open source and SaaS as “the future of enterprise applications.” And they are!) In fact, On Demand shares many of the community aspects that make open source so attractive:

• Application development: As a recent AMR report stated, “SaaS has created a new culture within the software community where customer service, user adoption, and easier implementations are the new gold standard.” Indeed, On Demand providers ascribe to an incremental development process that frequently rolls out new features to all customers and embraces customers as active participants in the specification of these enhancements. (In fact, I personally sit on an enhancement review board that prioritizes customer requests for new supply management functionality.)
• Application and service delivery: With On Demand, all customers leverage a shared but highly configurable instance of an application running on shared hardware within a shared data center. This communal approach provides economies of scale that lower total cost of both delivery and ownership, enhance security and performance, and deliver frequent enhancements to all customers — without additional fees or implementation costs.
• Community intelligence: As Sudy Bharadwaj, author of Aberdeen’s new On Demand Supply Management report, argues “On Demand allows for community benefits…enabling users to benefit from benchmarks from supply management activities of all members of a community.” On Demand users also benefit from deployment and process best practices that are shared between customers and incorporated into new service and content offerings from the On Demand provider. 

I countered most of Dave’s critiques of On Demand in my previous post on the subject. As for his disappointment that Sudy did not provide financial models comparing the TCO of On Demand solutions versus traditional installed and licensed applications, I applaud Aberdeen for not rehashing these old arguments. (The TCO benefits of On Demand have been well documented in previous Aberdeen reports and by other research firms, such as Triple-Tree.)

With its latest report, Aberdeen has moved the debate forward by focusing on other aspects of On Demand, such as measuring and quantifying time-to-value and the tangible impact of the model on supply management performance.

Email Forward & Bookmarks

Close this WindowBookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites

Ask backflip blinklist BlogBookmark Bloglines BlogMarks Blogsvine BUMPzee! CiteULike co.mments Connotea del.icio.us

DotNetKicks Digg diigo dropjack.com dzone Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Friendsite folkd.com Furl

Google Hugg Jeqq Kaboodle linkaGoGo LinksMarker Ma.gnolia Mister Wong Mixx MySpace MyWeb Netvouz

Newsvine PlugIM popcurrent Propeller Reddit Rojo Segnalo Shoutwire Simpy sk*rt Slashdot Sphere

Sphinn Spurl.net Squidoo StumbleUpon Technorati ThisNext Webride Windows Live Yahoo!

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML: 

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

More »